A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “What?”

  We were in her kitchen. Yulia had made us some hot dogs, and I was eating them with black bread and a beer when I told her about the interview. Their kitchen was large enough for a small aluminum-topped table, and it had a door to the balcony.

  “You converted our work into cultural capital,” Yulia said. “Yes or no?”

  Her face had grown hard and she wasn’t looking at me as she said this.

  “Well, yes, I suppose, but that’s what I do, it’s what we do, we write about things,” I said. “Is it wrong to write about things? Karl Marx wrote about things.”

  I was still happily eating, not quite understanding how pissed Yulia was.

  “Marx wrote so he could transform the world,” she said. “You wrote so you could get a job at a college with a nice lawn.”

  “Who says it has a nice lawn?”

  “I looked it up online.”

  The campus did have a small old-fashioned quad, but that wasn’t its most salient feature. “It’s also right next to a federal penitentiary!” I said.

  “Great,” said Yulia, “you can make yourself feel better by tutoring prisoners.”

  I had not seen this side of Yulia before, though I had always known it was there. I had seen it directed at economic injustice, at her father, at Shipalkin. But not yet at me. I put my fork down.

  “You know,” I said, “I had thought you guys might feel this way. When I started out I thought you would. But since then I’ve joined October. I’ve translated tons of articles for a website that still doesn’t exist. I’ve been to all the protests. At this point I think it’s unfair.”

  Yulia didn’t say anything.

  “Anyway,” I went on now, I couldn’t stop myself, “I’m not taking the job.”

  “No, you should take it. You’d be crazy not to take it.”

  “If I get it, will you come with me?”

  “I already told you no.”

  “Then I’m not taking it.”

  “You have to take it. It’s a good job, you said so yourself.”

  We had discussed the job a couple of times, mostly in the context of my saying that I would probably never get it.

  “It’s not good enough.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Not if you’re not coming.”

  “OK, you know what, don’t do anything heroic, all right? Let’s see if you get the job. Then we can have this conversation.”

  I said OK and it was in fact OK—there was no reason to have a big fight over something that might not even occur. At the same time my feelings were hurt.

  “Do you really think that?” I said, later in the evening.

  “Think what?”

  “That I’m just using you and Sergei to advance my academic career?”

  “I don’t know,” said Yulia. “You tell me.”

  This answer made me furious. I got out of bed and put on my jeans. I was leaving.

  “Where are you going?” said Yulia. “Katya’s not back until morning.” She and Anton had taken a weekend trip to Suzdal.

  “I’m going home,” I said. “The metro’s closing soon and I want to be there when my grandmother gets up. Or do you think I’m using her too?”

  Yulia shrugged. I saw the same look on her face as I’d seen when she was telling me about Shipalkin in the wake of his release. It was a look that expressed grave disappointment and disgust at human weakness, and especially at male human weakness. Women had it much, much worse than men, and yet they bore it somehow. Why couldn’t we? Were we such pussies? That is what that look said. And obviously, strictly speaking, she was right. But I thought, at that moment, that it was unfair to give that look to me.

  I walked out without saying anything more, and she let me. She called me while I was on the subway and I ignored it. She called me again when I got home and this time I answered.

  “Andryushik,” she said when I picked up the phone. She was crying. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I reacted that way. I mean, I do know. I don’t want you to leave me. I don’t want you to go to America. But I wasn’t being fair. If you get the job you should take it.”

  “I won’t get the job,” I said. “But if I get it, come with me?”

  “I can’t!” she said, crying harder. “I can’t leave my mother. Don’t you understand that?”

  I thought of my grandmother, who also didn’t have anyone.

  Something about Yulia crying—I’d never seen or heard her do it before—was contagious. I started crying too.

  “Yul’,” I said, “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” she said.

  “We’ll think of something,” I said.

  She sobbed. “Do you promise?”

  This was a really pathetic scene. I was getting tears and snot on my cell phone. And how could I promise anything? I had no money and lived with my grandmother and the best thing I had going for me just then—a Skype interview with Watson—was also, it was turning out, the worst. Nonetheless, I thought we would think of something. I thought I would think of something. “I promise,” I said.

  “Do you want me to come over?” said Yulia.

  “Right now?” I asked.

  “I can call a cab. It’ll be cheap.”

  “OK,” I said. “Call me when you’re pulling in and I’ll come out.”

  She slept over that night, and in the morning the three of us had breakfast.

  “Yulia,” my grandmother kept saying, and forgetting that she was saying it. “Yulia. What a beautiful name.”

  I agreed.

  * * *

  • • •

  Then, after all the hopes and arguments, I blew the interview. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it over Skype, but I didn’t have seven hundred dollars lying around to go flying to America. And anyway the connection on the windowsill was fine. That wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was me. I had spent so many years worrying that I would never get this opportunity that I was crazy with nerves. I kept interrupting the very kindly professors who asked me soft-ball questions, and then interrupting myself. The low point of the interview came when they asked me how I would try to arrest declining enrollment in Russian literature classes, and I started giving them a talk, which I didn’t believe, about the pop culture relevance of certain Russian writers. I even said something along the lines of “Pushkin was a Tupac figure.” There was a pause. “You know, because he got shot.”

  There was consternation among the search committee as they tried to determine whether I was kidding—I wished I had been kidding—and then just at that moment my grandmother walked into the kitchen in her bathrobe. I turned around—she waved. I turned back to the screen, wondering if the people in upstate New York had seen her. From the expressions on their faces I could tell that they had.

  “That’s my grandmother,” I murmured.

  “Andrew, thank you very much for taking the time to do this,” Sutherland purred. “We know it’s late there.”

  I nodded.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he said, and I saw him approaching the screen in a weirdly menacing fashion. Watson College disappeared, and then I was staring at the big empty Skype icon.

  Two weeks later, while checking the Slavic jobs website, I saw the name Alex Fishman. I saw it before I saw the rest; I was reading right to left. He had accepted an offer from Watson College.

  Sometimes you know something bad is going to happen, but it doesn’t help; in fact it’s like you have to experience it twice. I logged on to Facebook. Even after our blowup at dinner I hadn’t had the guts to unfriend Fishman—it just seemed unnecessary, he knew what I thought of him—but I made a point of ignoring his posts. Still, when I saw a big smiling photo of Fishman throwing a gang sign and the name of a college I had once hoped to teach at, I couldn’t help but read his status
update. It read: “I’m being shipped upstate! (To teach literature at Watson College!)”

  I wondered if there was some comment I could make that would somehow puncture Fishman’s incredible self-regard. Did he know how stupid he looked throwing a gang sign? Did he know that it got really cold up at Watson during the winter? I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t also reveal how pathetically jealous I felt.

  At that point, really for the first time, I had to face the prospect that I would never get a job. Why for the first time? I don’t know. I had always thought I’d make it through somehow, even in the face of mounting evidence that I would not. Something would turn up; my luck would change; I’d finally make it. Now it looked like I would not.

  And that was OK, maybe. I could stay in Russia. Yulia and I could move in together. Or Yulia could move in with me and my grandmother. Or . . . I would likely be allowed to keep my PMOOC classes for the next year. So I would have some income. Yulia also had some income. I hadn’t broached this with her yet, but I decided now that I would.

  4.

  I CONFRONT EMMA ABRAMOVNA

  AND THEN I put it off. It wasn’t that I had doubts about Yulia. I didn’t. I had doubts about myself. I was still in Moscow because—why? Because I couldn’t get a job in the States and because I wanted to foil Dima’s evil plan to sell our grandmother’s apartment. And—what? It seemed purely negative, reactive, like Russian foreign policy. It was as if I’d lost and failed my way into Yulia’s life. Was this a good foundation on which to build a future?

  My yearlong visa was expiring in mid-August, so one way or another I’d have to leave the country and get another one. It would probably mean going back to New York. And if I was going back to New York, it might make sense to spend a month and see if I could drum up some work. In any case, for the moment I was thinking about the summer.

  It was almost June and my grandmother had still not discussed her dacha dreams with Emma Abramovna. Or, rather, she had hinted at them numerous times, and Emma Abramovna had not taken her up on the hinting. Finally I decided that I should just go over there and ask.

  Emma Abramovna was an intimidating person. She had escaped from Hitler, had been exiled to Siberia as a Polish national, and had maintained her glamorous good looks that had invited a great deal of unwanted male attention, including at one point from the NKVD. Even among the generation that included my grandmother and Uncle Lev, she stood out. In short, as I sat before her, she half lying on her couch with a blanket draped over her lap, me in an armchair across from her, I was sitting before someone who was still quite formidable, no matter her age and condition.

  “So what have you been up to in Moscow?” she said.

  I told her about my work with October and our soon-to-be-launched website.

  “They’re, what, communists?” she asked.

  “Socialists,” I said.

  “Idiots!” she said. “Socialism has been tried in this country. I lived through it. And I can tell you that the only thing worse is fascism.”

  “They’re proposing something different,” I said.

  “They all propose something different, and in the end it’s the same. Look at China, Cuba, Cambodia—wherever you go in the socialist world they set up camps, and sometimes worse. No, thank you.”

  She started telling me the story of how she’d been kicked out of the Party in 1948 for refusing to question the loyalty of Jewish citizens who supported Israel. (Stalin was convinced that with the creation of Israel, Jews would become a fifth column inside the USSR.) I had heard this story before. But I listened again.

  “This group is anti-Stalinist,” I said, when she was done.

  “Well, thank God at least for that!” she said. Emma Abramovna was not about to get talked back into socialism by me.

  Eventually I got around to what I’d come there for. “Emma Abramovna,” I began, “as you know, Baba Seva lost her dacha in the nineties. Every summer she gets really sad when she has nowhere to go.”

  “I know,” said Emma Abramovna. “She tells me all about it.”

  “Well, and I was thinking. Maybe she could come stay with you at Peredelkino for a little while? It would make her summer so much better.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Emma Abramovna said right away. She did not seem surprised in the least by the suggestion. She had apparently not been oblivious to my grandmother’s hints. She had just chosen to ignore them.

  I, however, was surprised. “Really?” I said. I knew Emma Abramovna’s social life was a little more varied than my grandmother’s, but it didn’t seem like a round-the-clock party. She could fit in my grandmother, I thought. “Why not?” I said.

  “Borya and Arkady and their families will be visiting a lot,” Emma Abramovna said. “Really there’s not much space.”

  “There won’t even be a week where you’ll have room?” I said, begging now. “You’re her best friend!”

  “Well,” said Emma Abramovna, setting her mouth in a way that was unlike her, but then being brutally and entirely honest in a way that was: “she’s not mine.”

  And that was that. I was silent, and then Emma Abramovna suggested that we change the subject, and her aide, Valya, brought out some tea and cookies, and I gulped them down as quickly as I could and then took my leave as politely as I could. But I was heartbroken. It was like a door had been shut on my grandmother’s life, and she didn’t even know about it.

  * * *

  • • •

  As I walked home, I called Yulia to tell her the news.

  “That’s very sad,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Starost’ ne radost’. Know anyone else with a dacha?”

  “My mom goes to a sanatorium outside Kiev during the summers. Do you think your grandmother would enjoy that?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think she’d enjoy the trip to Kiev. In fact I’m sure she’d refuse to take it.”

  “Yes. Well, maybe Kolya will be done with his dacha in time.”

  She said it half jokingly, but it wasn’t the worst idea.

  “That hadn’t occurred to me,” I said.

  “Of course even if he does finish there won’t be much to look at,” said Yulia. “And nowhere to swim.”

  “My grandmother’s not a big swimmer these days. Do you think we can ask him?”

  “I don’t see why not. He can say no if he wants. We did help him build the thing.”

  I got off the phone as I was descending into the underpass at Pushkin Square. I walked through it holding my phone in my hand. It was bright and full of people, some hurrying home, others tarrying in front of one of the many kiosks. There were fancy malls all over Moscow now but it was easier and more convenient and cheaper to buy something in an underpass. A few years earlier a Chechen terrorist had set off a bomb in this underpass, killing a dozen people. For a while people avoided it, but then they started coming again. What could they do? It was the very center of the city. I felt a surge of solidarity with all these people who did not care one way or another whether Chechnya was independent, whether it was Islamic or not, but who had to worry nonetheless when they passed through the Pushkin underpass whether someone might decide to blow them up. I passed a pie stand where I sometimes got a nice apricot pie for thirty rubles. I was sorry that I’d eaten so many cookies at Emma Abramovna’s and was too stuffed to buy one now.

  I emerged right next to Pushkin. In his sideburns and top hat, he towered, twelve feet tall and green, over the square. Why so big? Pushkin himself was quite short. But he was a genius. The great-grandson of an African slave brought to Russia to entertain the tsar’s court, by the age of eighteen he was producing poetry that was clearly superior to any written in Russian until then. At the time, Russian literary language did not quite exist; most educated Russians wrote in French, only the very rich were educated, and what literature there was bore the
marks of this double separation from actual Russian life. Pushkin managed to change this. His poetry was exquisite and it sounded like Russian; even now, two hundred years later, it was perfectly clear and comprehensible. His talent was eventually too much. The tsar personally censored his work. He was surrounded by intrigue; a young French officer who was flirting with his wife killed him in a duel before he turned forty.

  I called Nikolai and he picked up right away. “Listen,” I said, “I’m hoping to get my grandmother out of town for a week sometime this summer, and I can’t really think of any place that would work, so I was wondering—do you think we could use your dacha for a week?”

  “Of course!” he said. “I would be honored to provide shelter for a woman whose dacha was taken from her by unscrupulous capitalists.” There was a pause. “But if the place is going to be ready for the summer, I’m going to need some help.”

  So for several weekends in a row I made the long trip out there and painted and sanded and helped the Uzbek construction guys unload their small trucks and set up the bathroom and the kitchen. We agreed that I could have the dacha for a week in mid-July.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the meantime, my grandmother grew increasingly despondent. She was shrinking physically, but her personality was shrinking as well. There was less and less of her inside her. She was becoming, more and more, what she had been as a little girl: the dutiful daughter of an overbearing mother. I had intuited that she’d been this way from her stories of her childhood; now I saw this very person before me, in the guise of a ninety-year-old with a cane.

  The semester was again rounding into its final stretch and this meant final papers and dozens if not hundreds of emails in which students asked for clarification about what the final paper entailed and what exactly I was looking for and could I send some samples of successful papers that they could emulate? I was able to do much of this from the windowsill, and my grandmother had become better at not interrupting. I think the fact that I was so visibly before her, at my computer, meant that she was both reassured that I was around and also convinced that I was doing something, and should be left alone.